Low-power consumption seamless wireless and wired links using transparent waveform transfer

This paper describes wired and wireless seamless networks consisting of radiowave and optical fiber links. Digital coherent technology developed for high-speed optical fiber transmission can mitigate signal deformation in radiowave links in the air as well as in optical fibers. Radio-over-fiber (RoF) technique, which transmits radio waveforms on intensity envelops of optical signals, can provide direct waveform transfer between optical and radio signals by using optical-to-electric or electric-to-optical conversion devices. Combination of RoF in millimeter-wave bands and digital coherent with high-performance digital signal processing (DSP) can provide wired and wireless seamless links where bit rate of wireless links would be close to 100 Gb/s. Millimeter-wave transmission distance would be shorter than a few kilometers due to large atmospheric attenuation, so that many moderate distance wireless links, which are seamlessly connected to optical fiber networks should be required to provide high-speed mobile-capable networks. In such systems, reduction of power consumption at media converters connecting wired and wireless links would be very important to pursue both low-power consumption and large capacity.